Modern feminism: politics and rights not spectacle

SlutWalk began in Toronto as a response to a specific act: the comments by a police officer that women should avoid dressing like sluts in order to avoid being raped.

The protest involved formal demands on the police to change their protocols, as well as promulgating a broader message: that victim-blaming is prevalent in society, and that it is wrong.

Participants were angry about victim-blaming and rightfully so. Take this recent story of two NYC cops, for instance, suspended with pay while rape allegations brought against them were investigated and trialled. The officers were recently acquitted, despite the woman’s testimony, despite audio and video evidence, despite the falsified reports. She was drunk, you see (yet not too drunk, the defence stressed, that she was ‘physically unable to consent to sex’). This is the kind of anger the Toronto march was born of, a direct response to a specific incident.

The SlutWalk ambience in Australia is different. The local incarnation of SlutWalk has made a lot of people uneasy – including many feminists who support the underlying principle. For many people, this unease comes directly from the fact that the politics and demands of SlutWalk in this context are either unclear or non-existent. In other words, as the movement spread around the world, the principle remained but the direct, practical demands, which were limited to the context in which the rally began, were lost.

In Melbourne, this was deliberate. The organisers worked hard to keep ‘traditional’ political divisions, parties and organisations out – to make SlutWalk rally on a principle, unaccompanied by calls for specific actions or demands. For them, this was a way to stay on message: the condemnation of victim-blaming was the rally’s core goal as they saw it and this shouldn’t be co-opted by organisations with political agendas.

The Brisbane arm of the movement, however, was different. Brisbane SlutWalk was organised by members of the Sex Party and staffed by a contingent of members wearing Sex Party t-shirts. Additionally, two of the speakers at the rally were Sex Party members, including Fiona Patten, the party’s founder. Her speech, by all accounts, was anti-victim-blaming and sex-positive, but she also plugged her party and suggested that people ought to join.

The Sex Party is a direct offshoot of the porn industry. It would not be hard to argue that their position actively advocates for and capitalises on this culturally embedded concept of woman-as-product, and more broadly, sex-as-product. And if the driving force behind people’s support of the rally is ultimately the conviction that women are not objects – that we are not ‘advertising’; that the decorations on our bodies do not mark us as essentially for your consumption – then it is in danger of being co-opted by the very forces it seeks to destabilise.

Similarly, if the contention of the SlutWalk movement is to destabilise this idea that women are essentially objects for consumption, action must follow from that to create a world where women are treated first and foremost as independent agents. There should be discussions about how to bring this into practice in society.

The problems that plague the SlutWalk are reflective of the nature of contemporary political activism in Australia in general, and indicative of the place that feminism occupies in the contemporary mindset. This ‘post-feminist’ mentality has been internalised by so many people that it’s hard enough to convince people of the need for some kind of political stance on gender inequality, let alone encourage them to agitate for change. A feminist is someone who believes there is serious inequality in the world that falls along gender lines, and that it favours men over women for no good reason. This is a very, very simple definition, and you don’t need to adopt the label of ‘feminist’ to believe in the truth of the statement. But it says something about the sociopolitical awareness of the population that this is even a matter for debate – that getting people to admit just this fact requires feminists to set the bar so low that we can’t even make practical demands for fear of alienating potential supporters on principle. But by not making demands we firmly situate the fight in the abstract, leaving oppressive structures in place to continue to be exploited by those who are already exploiting them.

Indeed, as elating as it was to see so many people on Melbourne streets demanding the freedom for women to be sexual beings while not responsible for the sexual violence committed upon their bodies, the way the SlutWalk debate has unfolded in Australia is demoralising. Media coverage has focused on semantics. Any criticism, legitimate or otherwise, is dismissed with the response: ‘You’re either with us, or you’re against us’ – a familiar refrain, but one with rather negative connotations.

Debate is healthy and constructive; it’s how movements thrive and it shapes their demands. A movement that asks for nothing concrete – say, the dismissal of any police officer who suggests in any way that a woman’s clothing is provocation for rape – that invites us all to merely ‘show up’, simply continues the atomised existences we had before the rally. All those individual voices hurling demands is the opposite of collectivity; it becomes white noise.

SlutWalk may have been a buzz, but it’s no victory. Context is everything. We live in a time where women are oppressed; we’re victorious when those oppressions lessen or are eliminated. When Australian women are finally seen as being worth equal pay (something our Prime Minister opposes), for instance, or when rates of rape and domestic violence drop, when we’re not keeping refugee women in detention or when Australian troops are not destroying the lives and livelihoods of Afghan women.

We should be talking about these issues, post rally, because SlutWalk has the potential to become the megaphone for a modern feminist movement. We should run an open organising meeting where we can debate the other issues that could help the movement to expand and continue. A movement that draws a divide between the Sex Party, whose interests lie in capital, and young conservatives, who fully accept that women can be objectified for political aims, and who would vote for policies that further destroy women’s lives. Because feminism is a broad church, one of the broadest, it is the role of progressive feminists to focus on the daily issues negatively impacting on the lives of women here and abroad.

Let’s not allow the heat and passion of SlutWalk to waste away. Let’s take this refusal to be victimised and channel it into something concrete, something that demands tangible improvements in the living conditions of women everywhere. It’s called a list of demands. Some of those older feminists know something about it; maybe we could ask for their input.